The October 2025 AWS outage revealed blockchain's dirty secret: despite claims of decentralization, 37% of Ethereum nodes and 70% of RPC traffic rely on centralized providers like AWS, Infura, and Alchemy. When AWS crashed for 14-16 hours, users couldn't access blockchains even though protocols kept running. The "bootstrap trap" forces new chains into expensive centralized services, creating censorship risks and innovation bottlenecks. Projects like Lava Network, Pocket Network, and Ankr are racing to build merit-based, decentralized infrastructure before the next outage strikes.The October 2025 AWS outage revealed blockchain's dirty secret: despite claims of decentralization, 37% of Ethereum nodes and 70% of RPC traffic rely on centralized providers like AWS, Infura, and Alchemy. When AWS crashed for 14-16 hours, users couldn't access blockchains even though protocols kept running. The "bootstrap trap" forces new chains into expensive centralized services, creating censorship risks and innovation bottlenecks. Projects like Lava Network, Pocket Network, and Ankr are racing to build merit-based, decentralized infrastructure before the next outage strikes.

When Amazon Crashed, "Decentralized" Blockchain went Down With it

Amazon Web Services experienced a 14-16-hour outage on October 20, 2025. This disrupted Snapchat, Fortnite, and more. However, beyond the disruption, it further unveiled a grim truth about crypto: an industry that has been touted as decentralized is dependent on centralized infrastructure, which, when it goes down, can cost billions.

\ Coinbase was not left. Robinhood traders? All affected. AWS hosted 37% of the Ethereum network, 2,371 out of 6,408 nodes. This was characterized by one post-mortem as “cryptographically decentralized, operationally centralized - the worst of both.”

\ How bad was it? The cost of AWS downtime ranges between 5,000 and 9,000 dollars per minute to enterprises, according to estimates by the industry. In the crypto community, the outage in October caused losses that grew rapidly up to tens of millions. Unprocessed orders, frozen custody services, and market chaos only added to the damage.

\ However, there is something awkward about this: it was not a blockchain failure. The protocols kept running. Ethereum maintained consensus, and Solana (though it had experienced previous outages) was not affected by the crisis. The problem was not with the chains; it was the way users use them.

The Two-Provider Problem

Alchemy and Infura are the only major companies that process approximately 70 percent of Ethereum RPC traffic. The concentration is even higher in layer 2 rollups and other chains. Developers revert to trusted vendors when they require trusted blockchain connectivity. These vendors are capable of absorbing traffic spikes and delivering compliance services as well as 24/7 services.

\ Yair Cleper, co-founder of Magma Devs and contributor to Lava Network, puts it bluntly: "In short: convenience won over decentralization. The market rewarded easy SDKs, brand safety, and enterprise contracts—not openness or merit."

So (And So): When Cloud Failed, So Did Decentralization

The AWS outage in October was not a one-time occurrence. This was the second critical disruption of the month, the first one having taken place less than ten days ago. These breaches revealed how vulnerable the crypto infrastructure stack is.

\ Layer 2 networks maintained the perfect consensus during the time of the outage. Sequencers continued to receive orders. Blocks were being produced. Everything was technically "working." But users could not reach it. RPC endpoints and APIs, which are based on central servers, became bottlenecks.

\ Big RPC providers Infura, Alchemy, QuickNode, and so on run big clusters on AWS. Exchanges, custodians, and wallets are also based on AWS to compute and store. In case AWS collapses, the hope of decentralization collides with the centralization.

The Bootstrap Trap

New blockchains and rollups are facing an unsolvable dilemma. They are either forced to pay large charges of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to existing offerings such as Infura or Alchemy, or rely on a network of community nodes that are not reliable enough to be used in production.

\ This "bootstrap trap" creates a vicious cycle. New chains can hardly attract developers when they lack reliable infrastructure. They cannot afford to incur an extra expense in the improvement of infrastructure without the developers. Consequently, a majority of chains collapse into the same central service providers, contributing to the further concentration issue.

\ "Small operators face a wall of friction," Cleper notes. "Demand is spiky. Without global Anycast, DDoS protection, and SRE coverage, costs crush you. Rollups default to 'safe' vendors that can tick compliance boxes. Even strong teams stay invisible because there's no neutral marketplace where great operators can prove their quality and get paid."

The Actual Cost of Centralization

The idea of centralization might be comfortable, but there are other effects that are concealed, leading to more losses than just an outage.

\ Performance tax: MEV bots and high-frequency traders must have a sub-4ms response time to be profitable. A single millisecond of latency might make a successful trade a failure and the user experience deteriorate.

\ Possible censorship risk: Both Infura and Alchemy blocked the RPC requests of Tornado Cash immediately upon its sanction in August 2022. Consequently, Ethereum users in nations under sanctions, such as Iran, have found it difficult to use services like OpenSea and MetaMask. Geofencing and sanctions can be imposed in a whole ecosystem by only a few controlled points.

\ Innovation freeze: Small players are not able to compete with large vendors in terms of paperwork and sales requirements. Diversity in infrastructure is reduced by a merit-based system where performance is rewarded, and not based on the enterprise. The market does lean towards the most prosperous vendors, who may not be the best technology.

\ Correlated failures: The AWS October outage demonstrated the extent to which concentration of the cloud may lead to a systemic risk. Validators suffer the penalty when the infrastructure collapses because centralized cloud providers are the cause of the error.

The Race to Fix What’s Broken

The issue was brought to the fore as the October outage further advanced the development of decentralized alternatives. A number of projects are building permissionless RPC infrastructure, which uses quality metrics to route traffic rather than enterprise contracts.

\ Lava Network recently published its mainnet, which had passed more than 100 billion requests on its testnet with more than 40 different chains. The protocol is used by industry leaders such as Fireblocks, NEAR, Arbitrum, and Starknet, which organize the independent node operators via continuous quality scoring.

\ "Lava Public RPC makes blockchain access behave like a utility: one endpoint for developers, many verified operators behind the scenes," explains Cleper. "Latency, error rates, and correctness are tracked 24/7. Best performers get more traffic; degraded ones get throttled until healthy again."

\ The protocol has further announced an enterprise-grade RPC platform to facilitate the adoption of stablecoins by banks and companies with deep integrations with Fireblocks' technology platform. Operators are rewarded LAVA tokens according to verified work, which are successful responses, multiplied by quality score, region, and type of request.

\ But Lava is not the only one that is addressing the problem of centralization. The competition is increasing with various providers trying various directions of decentralization:

Pocket Network continues to advance its token-based incentivization model and recently collaborated with Kleomedes to offer decentralized RPC services to 14 chains of Cosmos. Ankr operates more than 800 nodes in a decentralized network, has competitive prices, and allows community holders to use their native token to affect development. Chainstack has found a niche with its Hybrid Cloud functionality, which allows enterprises to run their specific nodes within their own cloud environment - an important feature to a team with high compliance requirements.

\ What brings the alternatives together is the shift in single-vendor control. They all attempt to solve one and the same problem: they want to make access to the blockchain resilient enough that, in the case of the next great outage, it does not suffer.

The Merit-Based Future

The future requires that infrastructure be based on performance, rather than incumbency. The quality-of-service scoring systems continuously measure latency, error, and correctness of data. Operators that perform better in terms of service, receive more traffic, and rewards, the operators whose performance decreases are automatically throttled.

\ This provides an anti-fragile access layer, a layer that becomes more resilient with the addition of additional operators without coordinated control. For new rollups and chains, this model addresses the bootstrap problem: a chain is allowed to expose endpoints of public RPC on day one without buying capacity from a single vendor.

\ When there are specialized node operators in that stack who have passed the conformance tests, they are added to the pool and start earning by serving production traffic. The more it is used, the greater the number of operators that come to enhance coverage and resilience.

Lessons From October

The October 2025 stress test had some harsh lessons for the industry:

  1. Technical decentralization is not enough: If, during a cloud outage, users do not have access to your network, then the statement about decentralization becomes empty. Decentralization is actually demonstrated by its availability.
  2. Access layer is more significant as compared to protocol design: Ethereum remained decently decentralized when AWS went offline, but the 37 percent of nodes on AWS led to serious access issues. Such networks as Layer-2 discovered that perfect consensus is pointless when the users are unable to submit transactions.
  3. Multi-cloud is now not optional: Organizations that depend on an individual vendor have to confront the reality of vendor lock-in.
  4. Reliability should not be compromised with cost optimization: Those teams that skimped on infrastructure redundancy failed to deliver to the customers when it was required most. The damage to reputation frequently surpasses the short-term loss of money.

The Road Ahead

The size of the Web3 market is projected to reach 6.15 billion dollars in 2025 with an annual growth rate of 38.9 percent over the next 10 years. This is fuelled by the expansion of the metaverse, the adoption of AI, and the explosion in the demand for decentralized applications - each of which demands a robust infrastructure as its base.

\ The incident of the outage in October clarified one thing: that explosive growth on centralized infrastructure is a house of cards. To deploy blockchain and realize its purported goal of decentralization, the access layer has to be as distributed as the networks on which it runs.

\ Cleper frames the challenge simply: "Infrastructure shouldn't be something you trust; it should be something you verify. We built Lava so that access to blockchain becomes a public good, not a private gateway."

\ The question is whether the industry will learn from October's wake-up call before the next outage strikes.

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Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API

Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API

Turn lengthy earnings call transcripts into one-page insights using the Financial Modeling Prep APIPhoto by Bich Tran Earnings calls are packed with insights. They tell you how a company performed, what management expects in the future, and what analysts are worried about. The challenge is that these transcripts often stretch across dozens of pages, making it tough to separate the key takeaways from the noise. With the right tools, you don’t need to spend hours reading every line. By combining the Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) API with Groq’s lightning-fast LLMs, you can transform any earnings call into a concise summary in seconds. The FMP API provides reliable access to complete transcripts, while Groq handles the heavy lifting of distilling them into clear, actionable highlights. In this article, we’ll build a Python workflow that brings these two together. You’ll see how to fetch transcripts for any stock, prepare the text, and instantly generate a one-page summary. Whether you’re tracking Apple, NVIDIA, or your favorite growth stock, the process works the same — fast, accurate, and ready whenever you are. Fetching Earnings Transcripts with FMP API The first step is to pull the raw transcript data. FMP makes this simple with dedicated endpoints for earnings calls. If you want the latest transcripts across the market, you can use the stable endpoint /stable/earning-call-transcript-latest. For a specific stock, the v3 endpoint lets you request transcripts by symbol, quarter, and year using the pattern: https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={q}&year={y}&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY here’s how you can fetch NVIDIA’s transcript for a given quarter: import requestsAPI_KEY = "your_api_key"symbol = "NVDA"quarter = 2year = 2024url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={API_KEY}"response = requests.get(url)data = response.json()# Inspect the keysprint(data.keys())# Access transcript contentif "content" in data[0]: transcript_text = data[0]["content"] print(transcript_text[:500]) # preview first 500 characters The response typically includes details like the company symbol, quarter, year, and the full transcript text. If you aren’t sure which quarter to query, the “latest transcripts” endpoint is the quickest way to always stay up to date. Cleaning and Preparing Transcript Data Raw transcripts from the API often include long paragraphs, speaker tags, and formatting artifacts. Before sending them to an LLM, it helps to organize the text into a cleaner structure. Most transcripts follow a pattern: prepared remarks from executives first, followed by a Q&A session with analysts. Separating these sections gives better control when prompting the model. In Python, you can parse the transcript and strip out unnecessary characters. A simple way is to split by markers such as “Operator” or “Question-and-Answer.” Once separated, you can create two blocks — Prepared Remarks and Q&A — that will later be summarized independently. This ensures the model handles each section within context and avoids missing important details. Here’s a small example of how you might start preparing the data: import re# Example: using the transcript_text we fetched earliertext = transcript_text# Remove extra spaces and line breaksclean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip()# Split sections (this is a heuristic; real-world transcripts vary slightly)if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1)else: prepared, qna = clean_text, ""print("Prepared Remarks Preview:\n", prepared[:500])print("\nQ&A Preview:\n", qna[:500]) With the transcript cleaned and divided, you’re ready to feed it into Groq’s LLM. Chunking may be necessary if the text is very long. A good approach is to break it into segments of a few thousand tokens, summarize each part, and then merge the summaries in a final pass. Summarizing with Groq LLM Now that the transcript is clean and split into Prepared Remarks and Q&A, we’ll use Groq to generate a crisp one-pager. 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We’ll write a helper to summarize any text block, then run it for both sections and merge. import osimport textwrapimport requestsGROQ_API_KEY = os.environ.get("GROQ_API_KEY") or "your_groq_api_key"GROQ_BASE_URL = "https://api.groq.com/openai/v1" # OpenAI-compatibleMODEL = "llama-3.1-70b" # choose your preferred Groq modeldef call_groq(prompt, temperature=0.2, max_tokens=1200): url = f"{GROQ_BASE_URL}/chat/completions" headers = { "Authorization": f"Bearer {GROQ_API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json", } payload = { "model": MODEL, "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a precise, neutral equity research analyst."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}, ], "temperature": temperature, "max_tokens": max_tokens, } r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload, timeout=60) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"].strip()def build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year): template = """ You are an equity research analyst. Summarize the following earnings call section for {symbol} ({quarter} {year}). Be factual and concise. Return: 1) TL;DR (3–5 bullets) 2) Results vs. guidance (what improved/worsened) 3) Forward outlook (specific statements) 4) Risks / watch-outs 5) Q&A takeaways (if present) Text: <<< {section_text} >>> """ return textwrap.dedent(template).format( symbol=symbol, quarter=quarter, year=year, section_text=section_text )def summarize_section(section_text, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024"): if not section_text or section_text.strip() == "": return "(No content found for this section.)" prompt = build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year) return call_groq(prompt)# Example usage with the cleaned splits from Section 3prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")final_one_pager = f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks — Key Points{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()print(final_one_pager[:1200]) # preview Tips that keep quality high: Keep temperature low (≈0.2) for factual tone. If a section is extremely long, chunk at ~5–8k tokens, summarize each chunk with the same prompt, then ask the model to merge chunk summaries into one section summary before producing the final one-pager. If you also fetched headline numbers (EPS/revenue, guidance) earlier, prepend them to the prompt as brief context to help the model anchor on the right outcomes. Building the End-to-End Pipeline At this point, we have all the building blocks: the FMP API to fetch transcripts, a cleaning step to structure the data, and Groq LLM to generate concise summaries. The final step is to connect everything into a single workflow that can take any ticker and return a one-page earnings call summary. The flow looks like this: Input a stock ticker (for example, NVDA). Use FMP to fetch the latest transcript. Clean and split the text into Prepared Remarks and Q&A. Send each section to Groq for summarization. Merge the outputs into a neatly formatted earnings one-pager. Here’s how it comes together in Python: def summarize_earnings_call(symbol, quarter, year, api_key, groq_key): # Step 1: Fetch transcript from FMP url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={api_key}" resp = requests.get(url) resp.raise_for_status() data = resp.json() if not data or "content" not in data[0]: return f"No transcript found for {symbol} {quarter} {year}" text = data[0]["content"] # Step 2: Clean and split clean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip() if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1) else: prepared, qna = clean_text, "" # Step 3: Summarize with Groq prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol, quarter, year) qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol, quarter, year) # Step 4: Merge into final one-pager return f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()# Example runprint(summarize_earnings_call("NVDA", 2, 2024, API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY)) With this setup, generating a summary becomes as simple as calling one function with a ticker and date. You can run it inside a notebook, integrate it into a research workflow, or even schedule it to trigger after each new earnings release. Free Stock Market API and Financial Statements API... Conclusion Earnings calls no longer need to feel overwhelming. With the Financial Modeling Prep API, you can instantly access any company’s transcript, and with Groq LLM, you can turn that raw text into a sharp, actionable summary in seconds. This pipeline saves hours of reading and ensures you never miss the key results, guidance, or risks hidden in lengthy remarks. Whether you track tech giants like NVIDIA or smaller growth stocks, the process is the same — fast, reliable, and powered by the flexibility of FMP’s data. Summarize Any Stock’s Earnings Call in Seconds Using FMP API was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story
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